Ann Kipling smudges the graphite from her pencil onto the cream-coloured surface of the paper. It appears like billows of smoke on the thinly-drawn hills swirled with trees and shrubs.

The scene is not unlike what Kipling experienced when fire took hold of the Cedar Hills near her home six years ago.

The valley walls now coloured in yellows, browns and oranges –– soon to be blanketed in white –– are still dotted by the charred remains.

It’s one of the reasons one of B.C.’s most celebrated artists doesn’t stray away from the Falkland-area home she has shared with husband Leonhard Epp, an equally celebrated ceramics sculptor, since 1976.

While everyday life seems virtually unchanged, the elements are constantly evolving, and this contrast, Kipling says, has inspired her to draw right from her backyard.

“My art is centered to place,” said Kipling. “I find breaks can be disruptive.”

However, Kipling doesn’t seem to mind taking a break from installing her Recent Landscape Drawings, which opened at the Vernon Public Art Gallery last week. And her reputation as an artist does require her to travel occasionally.

Represented nationally by the Douglas Udell gallery, her work can be find in public and private collections around the country. Last year, she received an honorary degree from Emily Carr University, and in 2003, she was the first recipient of the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Visual Arts.

However, despite her achievements, Kipling prefers to talk about her life at home.

The Victoria-born artist met Epp in the late-’50s while a third-year student at the Vancouver College of Art, and eventually became a teacher for 10 years, before moving to Oyama with Epp in ‘73.

“I remember we moved to Falkland in July three years later, it was the wettest summer. It rained and rained. It was like being back on the coast,” she said.

Epp continued to teach and took on a job in the fine arts department at the former Okanagan University College, while Kipling decided to give teaching a rest and concentrate on her own work.

“Teaching is not really my personality,” she said. “One-on-one is OK, but I’m not great with the programming. I like to find my own answers to keep up with my own work. The conflict is to make this understandable from the beginning and not lose what I’m trying to do.”

Despite both being artists, Kipling says she and Epp differ completely in their practices.

“We don’t even show each other our work,” she laughed. “He works on a kiln outside and I take over the house, the ground floor, the upstairs studio. I also work outside through April to now, depending on the weather.

“We are both artists with very different work, but we agree on a certain lifestyle. We are not carbon copies of each other.”

Although she made a name for herself in woodcut and lithography printing, and studied and taught figure drawing (a medium she says she would love to return to one day), Kipling has always returned to the land.

She even worked from animals, specifically the goats she and Epp raised on their property, until a 1996 accident that smashed her left leg, and a hip replacement some years later, left her unable to chase after her subjects.

“I couldn’t get up and down to the barn and I couldn’t carry my drawing boards, so in ‘97 I started to look at the landscape again,” she said.

She came up with different methods and media. Her supplier introduced her to a Sakura pigment pen, which acts like a fine brush, when she first started out, then after a lapse where she returned to printmaking and painting in watercolours, Kipling started drawing again, this time using graphite, dry pencils, charcoal and coloured pencils.

“Over a period of time, I have occasionally made leaps and changes. It’s a transformation. As soon as the edges fade, I find I can’t work, and I need to be changing media or finding something else to focus on. I can’t force it.”

Sketched over a period from 2005 to present, Kipling’s most recent pen-and-ink drawings are, in a sense, a return to form, and show a repetition that exemplifies the same subject, in this case, the hills that surround her, but in a way that could be deemed as abstract.

“The wonderful thing about drawing is it’s immediate and tactile. I don’t draw from photos, or conscious imagination. I like doing it directly when I see it. There’s something about the energy field, the change in wind, light, elements, even the bugs flying around make it real for me.”

A work in progress, Kipling wants to continue drawing from the landscape, but may return to the figure, and she has a few shows coming up, including a solo exhibition in Burnaby and group shows with the Udell gallery in Vancouver and Edmonton.

Kipling’s Recent Landscape Drawings can be viewed in the VPAG’s Topham Brown Memorial Gallery until Dec. 22. The artist will give a talk about her work at the gallery on Friday, Oct. 16 at 6:30 p.m.